Overview

This is the site for the Collaborative Research Project on Lobbying and policy
advocacy in the US federal government. The research project is a major, multi-year
academic study of the process of lobbying and policymaking in Washington, DC.
The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (grants #SBR-9905195
for the period of 1999 and 2000 and #SES-0111224 for the period of 2001 to 2003),
with significant support from Penn State University. Here you will find information
on the background of the project, the principal investigators, documentation
about research procedures, and a series of case files giving information about
lobbying activities on a sample of public policy issues. In 2009 we published
a book reporting on our findings, Lobbying and Policy Change, winner
of the Leon Epstein Award for the best book on the topic of political organizations
and parties. Click on "Documentation and Publications" to learn more
about that book and to get the data associated with it. Click on "Our Sample
of Issues" to learn more about the research on which the book is based.

Background

The project focuses on a random sample of public policy issues on which lobbyists
were active. Our initial interviews, which were used to identify our sample
of cases, were conducted between February 1999 and October 2002. We interviewed
a sample of lobbyists and asked them to describe their activities on the most
recent issue dealing with the federal government on which they were active.
The lobbyists were chosen randomly from a list of registered lobbyists, with
those organizations that lobby the most having the highest probabilities of
being selected. The result, as readers will see below, is a random sample
of policy issues. Interviews focus on lobbying activities, the make-up of
coalitions on all sides of the issue, arguments and evidence being used, the
venues of government decision-making, and other questions. All of the respondents
were assured of anonymity; therefore we do not release notes from the actual
interviews. Rather, we used our interviews to do two things: First, we conducted
extensive web searches for publicly available information such as news stories,
congressional action (such as bills, hearings, testimony, committee reports,
and member news releases), executive branch activities (such as regulations
or proposed regulations), interest-group statements (such as press releases
or information from their web sites), and other information. We have provided
either a link to these sites, for those that are expected to be permanent,
or copies of the relevant web pages with a note of where they were originally
found. Second, we have written a short overview of each case that provides
background material and a description of the lobbying activities. These case
overviews provide a wealth of information about each case as well as links
to the web-based primary materials that we have located through our searches.
Researchers and students interested in lobbying should be able to conduct
a wealth of research simply by comparing the cases we have documented here.

The links above will take you throughout our web site. Click on "Our
Sample of Issues" to see the list of issues and then click on any issue
to find out more. The "Documentation and Publications" section includes
background information, publications from the project, grant proposals, a
copy of our interview protocols, and other detailed information about how
we did our research. "Related Projects" links to other projects
we've been involved in including the Policy Agendas Project, a study of lobby
disclosure reports in Washington, and other sites. Finally, click on "Thanks
to Our Students" to see just how massive this project has been, and who
were the people behind the scenes who did so much of the work. Without their
help, this project would not have been possible.

Note that interviews were conducted from 1999 to 2003; therefore all our
cases come from the 106th (1999-2000) or the 107th (2001-02) Congress. The
106th Congress was the last Congress of the Clinton Presidency; the 107th
was the first of the Bush Presidency. Searching for related documents and
constructing our web site continued through June 30, 2004. Only minor changes
and corrections are expected after July 1, 2004. In January 2011 we revised
this page to add more complete documentation including reference to our book
and the associated data files for distribution.